To revamp a website like Rolling Stone Magazine is basically an intricate exercise in remodeling an existing platform by reusing the already created content from the old database. Re-entering all the content would be insane. This really means that you have to find solutions in showing all the various content types in intuitive ways. The tricky part was to find a way to migrate all the existing content – the articles and posts from previous years – and to adapt the structure to fit the new upcoming articles at the same time. You also need to find the right possibilities to inter-link certain parts and have spaces ready to promote brand activities and products. The previous website was a semi dynamic Joomla site but had parts of it’s core hardcoded inside of the template.
We wanted to make the new website more dynamic in its front-end layout options but also more functional for the writers and editors in the back-end. This resulted in a set of grids with different modules to show the variety of content: images, texts, video, audio.
The new website was planned to be released together with a native app version for iPhone and iPad. Apart from this the print edition was also being transformed into a digital edition with the help of Adobe DPS and InDesign.
This project was designed and completed during my tenure as Head of Creative at HGW Media – © 2013 HGW Media
